Jon Foster starts an oil painting using his photo reference. Also, he discusses the importance of good research and how to combine several bits and pieces into a working image. Working with traditional oil paints, he gets the painting to a certain level of finish, then produces a high resolution photograph to import into Photoshop. He finishes the painting as a digital image.

Premium Content: Parts I and II

Part 1: Jon starts with his sketchbook for producing quick ideas, and then goes in-depth about the importance of thumbnails, value studies, producing your own reference, and using bits and pieces of found reference for inspiration. Watch as he starts covering his white canvas with an overall tone to produce the beginning of his wet-into-wet image.

Part 2: Continuing the early stages of the image, Jon shows lots of ways to produce marks with paint, using different painting tools. Have you ever thought about painting with cloth, or maybe cardboard? Jon will use whatever he can think of to produce interesting marks and effects.

Premium Content: Parts III and IV

Part 3: The values are tweaked and adjusted in the wet oil paint. Adding pigment, wiping out, adding more pigment, and adjusting values are what Jon gets involved with as he zeros in on his visualization of this painting. You can see him mix the oil paint with the "palette cam" that is hovering above his palette.

Part 4: Composition is always in the forefront of Jon's work. He talks about subtle compositional changes and enhancements in this section. Also, the scale of his brushes and brushwork at different points in the painting. Although almost entirely monochromatic up to this stage, Jon slowly and carefully begins adding hints of color to bring the image closer to his finished visualization of the image.

Premium Content: Parts V and VI

Part 5: Using a brush about three times larger than you would expect, Jon keeps refining the value, color, and composition of this image. All sizes of brushes are used as he explains his thinking during the overall process. Finally the fire begins to take shape in this section; the warmth of the flames dominate over the cool neutrals used previously. A few, well-placed dark accents really make this painting pop!

Part 6: Further development with chunky paint while getting the background to work with the rest of the piece. He then proceeds to "destroy" parts of the image and rebuilds them, knowing that he can enhance the image with the reworking of the paint. As always, he will surprise you with the different "tools" he uses to manipulate the paint. In this section, he gets the image to the point of finish he desires, and then produces a high-resolution photograph that he will load into Photoshop and Painter in the next series. He will finish the image as a digital file. In this section, he gets the image to the point of finish he desires, and then produces a high-resolution photograph that he will load into Photoshop and Painter in the next series. He will finish the image as a digital file.